**Source: PSS vol. 44**

They say the most reliable method of hunting foxes is the following: traced foxes are surrounded at a certain distance by a rope with red flags at a small height above the snow; fearing the obviously artificial, "human" construction, the fox emerges only when and where this "enclosure" of flags opens up; and there the hunter awaits it. It would seem that caution for such an animal, which everyone hunts, is the most positive quality. But even here the "continuation of an advantage" turns out to be a disadvantage. The fox is caught precisely on its excessive caution.

I must confess to one error which I happened to make at the III Congress of the Comintern, also out of excessive caution. At that Congress I stood on the extreme right flank. I am convinced that this was the only correct position, because a very numerous (and "influential") group of delegates, with many German, Hungarian and Italian comrades at their head, occupied an immoderate "left" and incorrectly left position, too often replacing a sober assessment of a situation not very favorable for immediate and direct revolutionary action with intensified waving of red flags. Out of caution, concerned that this undoubtedly incorrect leftward deviation should not give a false direction to the entire tactic of the Comintern, I defended Levi in every way, expressing the supposition that he had lost his head (I did not deny that he had lost his head), perhaps from excessive fear of the errors of the left, and that there had been cases when communists who had lost their heads later again "found" it. Even admitting—under the pressure of the "left"—that Levi was a Menshevik, I pointed out that even such an admission did not yet settle the matter. For example, the entire history of the 15-year struggle of the Mensheviks against the Bolsheviks in Russia (1903-1917) proves, as the three Russian revolutions also prove this, that the Mensheviks on the whole were absolutely wrong and that they were in fact agents of the bourgeoisie in the labor movement. This is an indisputable fact. But this indisputable fact does not eliminate the fact that in individual cases the Mensheviks were right against the Bolsheviks, for example, on the question of the boycott of the Stolypin Duma in 1907.

Since the III Congress of the Comintern, eight months have already passed. Apparently, our then dispute with the "left" has already become outdated, already been settled by life. I turned out to be wrong about Levi, because he successfully proved that he had ended up on the Menshevik path not by accident, not temporarily, not only by "overdoing things" against the most dangerous error of the "left," but for a long time, firmly, according to his entire nature. Instead of honestly recognizing after the III Congress of the Comintern the necessity of again requesting readmission to the party, as a man who had temporarily lost his head in exasperation at certain errors of the left should have done, Levi began to cause petty mischief to the party and from around the corner to trip it up, i.e., to render factual services to agents of the bourgeoisie from the II and II Internationals.

The development of the German and Italian communist parties after the III Congress of the Comintern proves that the error of the left at this Congress has been taken into account by them and is being corrected—gradually, slowly, but steadily; the decisions of the III Congress of the Communist International are being carried out loyally in practice. The transformation of the old type of European parliamentary, in reality reformist and only slightly colored in a revolutionary hue, party into a new type of party, into a genuinely revolutionary, genuinely communist party, is an extraordinarily difficult thing. The example of France demonstrates this difficulty, perhaps more clearly than anything else. In everyday life, to remake the type of party work, to transform routine, to achieve the goal that the party should become the vanguard of the revolutionary proletariat, without departing from the masses, but ever more

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